In Retrospect

Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor

At the age of 64, Meryl Streep has become one of the biggest box-office draws in Hollywood, leading bubbly comedies like It’s Complicated and Mamma Mia! While continuing her unprecedented streak of Oscar nominations. But that lighter side wasn’t always easy for the actress, who has been called the greatest of her generation for more than three decades. In the new book Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor, former LA Weekly film critic Karina Longworth revisits one of Streep’s early attempts at broad comedy with 1992’s Death Becomes Her, and contrasts that film’s harsh reception to her more recent enormous hits, starting with 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada. Below we talk to Longworth about how Streep transitioned from a too-serious actress with plenty of accolades but inconsistent box-office clout to an outspoken megastar; we also excerpt from Longworth’s book, which can be purchased now from Amazon or Phaidon .

How did Meryl Streep wind up in this position, before Death Becomes Her, in which almost nobody thought she was funny? How did that Greatest Living Actress moniker get stuck to her so firmly?

Streep was on a pedestal of “seriousness” before she ever made a movie, due to her absolute dominance at Yale and, in her short time there before The Deer Hunter, the New York theater world. Then she was nominated for an Oscar for her first significant film role, and five years after her screen debut, she had won two Oscars - both for movies (Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie’s Choice) that were total feel-bad tearjerkers. Finally, she starred in Out of Africa, which was a huge hit and a best-picture Oscar winner — the kind of massive zeitgeist event that’s easy to make fun of. But the backlash against Streep outlasted the life of that movie, as over the next few years, she made one film after another that came nowhere near that level of success. She never had a chance to prove that she could be funny onscreen until the late ‘80s, and when she did try to make that transition, because of where she was in her career at that point, I think it was read, or misread, willfully or otherwise, as an act of desperation. Reading the way she was written about at the end of that decade and the beginning of the next, I got the feeling that the media, consciously or not, seized on this as Streep’s moment to be taken down a peg, and that skepticism over her sense of humor and/or her choice of role is just the form that backlash took.

How do you see her move toward comedy—at first unsuccessfully with Death, then with huge success—as part of her feminism?

I think most of her comedies feel like they’re coming from a feminist place, in that they give voice, in the most mainstream of vehicles, to a type of female experience that had previously not typically been taken on as a subject by mainstream film. Movies like The Devil Wears Prada and It’s Complicated aren’t “more feminist” than, say, Sophie’s Choice or Silkwood, but their genre and their success allowed them to reach more people. Ultimately, the real victory of Streep’s later comedic hits is that they gave evidence to the industry that there was an audience for those kinds of movies. As Streep herself said, when Mamma Mia! was becoming the biggest hit of her career, “It’s so gratifying. Because it’s [attracting] the audience that nobody really gives a shit about.”

Does that speech she gave for Emma Thompson at the National Board of Review gala suggest she’s totally given up on the idea you promote in the book, that she was carefully avoiding being too political?

As I hope the book makes clear, I think she's changed her priorities over the course of 40 years—as people do. I think she understood, when she first started in the late ’70s, that she could do more, get away with more, in her movies, if her persona was not that of a Jane Fonda. We’ve seen that, around 1989 when she turned 40, the industry wasn’t ready for her to change that persona. But as the years passed, she became increasingly vocal about her politics, and generally openly defiant when faced with what she perceived as bullshit. Over the last 10 years or so (in my book, I call Adaptation a turning point), she’s exhibited an extraordinary looseness, onscreen and off; she seems to feel free to be herself in a way she didn’t before. Or, to borrow one of her lines from Bridges of Madison County (another film that, I think, is a crucial stop on the journey from there to here): “As one gets older, one’s fears subside. What becomes most important is to be known.”

What's your favorite thing that you learned about Meryl that people can learn from the book?

All of this stuff that we’re taking about, really. What I hope is that the book helps get the message out, particularly to young women, that Meryl Streep may belong on the same continuum as Katharine Hepburn as a grande dame of acting in cinema, but she’s also on the same continuum as someone like Kathleen Hanna, in that she’s managed to spread truth about the inner lives and lived experience of women who can’t speak for themselves, through pop entertainment.

From the Collection Cinémathèque française/Universal Pictures.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, less than a decade into stardom, Meryl Streep found herself at a career crossroads, fighting off a backlash. Commanding an average salary of $4 million per picture—nowhere near what comparable male stars earned, but a lot for a woman—she was considered by some to be overpaid. “National treasure or no,” as Premiere put it, “Streep still cannot open a film.” The Streep fatigue was summed up by the title of a Mike Hammer column: “Is Meryl Streep ever going to lighten up?”

In fact, Streep had long been “looking for a script that made me laugh,” but she felt distanced from Hollywood’s idea of “comedy”: “I go to a lot of movies where people are all around me laughing and I feel like I’m from outerspace because I find it dangerous and stupid and horrible and degrading to women and all these things.” She turned forty in 1989, having recently relocated her family from New York to L.A., and was now a middle-aged woman living in the capital of the film industry—a city where, as one piece on Streep put it, “liposuction is fast becoming as popular as the convertible.”

She felt the difference immediately. “I was offered within one year three different witch roles,” she’d say later. “It was almost like the world was saying—or the studios were saying—’We don’t know what to do with you.’”

The pressure to “lighten up” and the sense that, as a woman in Hollywood, her clock was ticking together influenced Death Becomes Her, Robert Zemeckis’ 1992 horror farce about “the living dead in Beverly Hills,” starring Streep as a vain actress who, driven mad by competition between women within a toxic industry town, embraces the secret to eternal youth, damn the consequences. To Streep, it “was a documentary about the Los Angeles fixation with aging.”

Death, Streep would say, “was in advance of its time.” In its time, reviews were vicious. “This is a movie that hates women,” declared Richard Corliss in Time. The LA Weekly’s Ella Taylor had a more nuanced response. She marveled at “a portrayal of aging women that’s as vicious as any I’ve ever seen. They’re so over the top that you can’t possibly see them as anything but a send-up of a culture whose obsessive search for youth and beauty has rendered it utterly grotesque—and, perhaps unwittingly, a comment on what middle-aged actresses have to do to stay in the game.”

At the time, Streep’s first comedy phase (which also included She-Devil and Defending Your Life, plus the Mike Nichols dramedies Heartburn and Postcards From the Edge) was deemed by most to be a failure. Later, when a reporter suggested that Death in particular was beneath her, she snapped sarcastically, “I’m so sorry you think that,” adding, “Everything I do is serious… even the hyperbolic comedies like Death Becomes Her.” The pressure on women to stall the aging process remained at the front of her mind. “I know movies are a function of our dream world. And when you project yourself on screen, it’s easier to project yourself into what you were, not what you are.” She sighed. “Movies are a young person’s playground.”

From the Collection Archives du 7e Art/Photo12/Columbia Pictures.

Cut to 2008, when Streep was feted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Watching the clip reel, Streep wished she could send a message to her younger self. “All I could see was this beautiful young woman who was anxious about whether she was too heavy or if her nose was too big. I felt like saying to her, ‘Just relax and it will all be O.K.’”

The elder Streep seemed to be a living model of that simple piece of advice. By the late 2000s, many of the actresses she had been compared to and/or competitive with for most of her screen career, with the notable exceptions of Diane Keaton and Sigourney Weaver, had all but vanished from mainstream films. Meanwhile, beginning with The Devil Wears Prada, Streep would star in four $100-million hits in less than four years. In defiance of the conventional “wisdom” that there was no life for actresses in Hollywood past the age of forty, Streep was becoming both a box office star and an unlikely sex symbol. In Prada, her character epitomized glamour; she starred in both Mamma Mia! and It’s Complicated as older women pursued by multiple suitors; in Julie & Julia, Streep played a not-conventionally-attractive woman in an extraordinarily sexually satisfying marriage.

Mike Nichols wasn’t exaggerating when he said of his frequent collaborator, “She broke the glass ceiling of an older woman being a big star—it has never, never happened before.” Streep acknowledged that her wave of popularity was “only happening now because there are more women in decision-making positions who are able to green light movies,” such as Amy Pascal at Sony and Donna Langley at Mamma Mia! studio Universal. “The smart guys banked on Hellboy [II: The Golden Army] to carry them throughout the year. The Mamma Mia! wagon is pulling all those movies that didn’t have any problem getting made. Our budget would have fit in the props budget of Hellboy.”

Streep felt she also owed her latter-day success to her past. After “the period when a woman was attractive and marriageable or something—not ‘marriageable.’ Fuckable I guess is the word…they really didn’t know what to do with you…” She had been able to become the exception to that rule, she said, partially because “I wasn’t that word that I just said [...]. when I was a younger actress, that wasn’t the first thing about me.”

But she also acknowledged that age itself had changed her approach to her work, and to the way she saw herself. “I think you just have to get sick of hearing the accommodation in your approach to things,” she said in 2010. “As there begins to be less time ahead of you, you want to be exactly who you are, without making it easier for everyone else.”